


Scenes

by B_Radley



Series: Gandalf's Way [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Art, Healing, Love, Memories, Multi, Photographs, lost but found, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 06:35:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15237534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/B_Radley/pseuds/B_Radley
Summary: On a quest at the end of a war, a former Jedi and rebel reflects on her family of choice





	Scenes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Merfilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Claims Made](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8855761) by [Merfilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly). 



> The snapshot in question - https://b-radley66.tumblr.com/image/175729086535
> 
> Art by the wonderful @rebekahs-art on tumblr: http://rebekahs-art.tumblr.com/post/173898060211/hey-guys-im-finally-making-a-commissions-post

Ahsoka brings her eyes from the mesmerizing destruction of hyperspace to the sleeping compartment of the old Jedi shuttle. She checks the controls with a brief glance, bringing herself out of her meditation trance.

She rises and walks aft. She looks down at the sleeping younger woman, as another brief, low sound comes from her. She smiles and runs her fingers through the dark purple hair, then draws the blanket up higher around Sabine’s shoulders. 

On a whim, she reaches down and kisses Sabine on her forehead. The warrior-artist murmurs, then shifts slightly. Ahsoka’s smile widens, then fades as the memories flow into her mind. Memories not of losses, but of reunions postponed—at least more than the few hours she had with the makers of those memories. 

Ahsoka reaches into the pocket of the long robe slung over the back of the pilot’s seat. She brings out a tiny device, a brand new one, still gleaming out of its package, but still reliable. She smiles as she thinks of a young Pantoran slicer, painstakingly recovering and transferring the contents of a long-defunct, uncharged comm to this device. A comm that had been with her through a journey to a long-dead world, through the Force itself.

Without a word, Ano had handed her the new comm, her eyes blank. Ahsoka looks down at the memory of their shared pain. Two minutes later, she remembers, she had heard the new comm chime. Ano had managed to insult both her new outfit and her parentage as she always had. 

By text. 

_Healing comes in a variety of ways_ , Ahsoka thinks. 

She punches a button on the device, hoping she remembers how the damned thing works. A projection rises above it; a projection of a flat commpic. One that had been given to her by the woman who had taken it, so many years ago. She smiles at the word in the woman’s language, for their relationship. _Ta’in’gere. Sister of the heart._

Ahsoka recalls Dani Faygan telling her about the pic. A mission to a near-deserted world, not long after Dani had discovered that the man once known as Taliesin Croft was alive. Alive and living with his losses. Fulfilling his birthright as the Covenant, or protector of Corellia

Living with a loss, in his mind, that included her. Just as he was lost to her, except for brief unexplainable sensations in the Force; sensations that became more clear in retrospect, after they had reconnected. 

She sets the comm down on the table near her bunk. She sits on the bunk, glancing at the status monitor. She pulls her boots off, then draws her knees up, resting her chin on them. She reaches out and increases the size of the holo. She pulls one glove from her hand, then reaches out, touching the face displayed in the air. 

Ahsoka takes a deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment. She opens them, focusing again on the face that she ghost-touches.

Croft, or Bryne Covenant as he’d become known by the time this holo was snapped, stares at the recorder. His green eyes, usually warm, are distant, as if unaware of Dani Faygan holding her comm up. His shoulders are slumped, as if already weary of the war, even in its earliest, embryonic stages.

She feels her heart twist at the absurdity of that thought. He had already survived the crucible of the Clone War and its resultant destruction of everything they had ever known.

Her eyes track down his figure; a mix of all of his cultures, encapsulated in one image. She grins as she looks over at Sabine, then looks back at the smaller handprint on the left side of his heart. A child’s hand, dipped in a cacophony of colors, as if the child had merely smeared an artist’s pallet and smashed her hand down. A mix of colors that had decorated a younger version of the sleeping woman’s armor, when they had first met, nearly a decade ago. As it always does, her mind travels to a scene of watching the young woman delicately sketch, her face wrinkled in concentration. She flushes slightly at the result of that sketch; a portrait of her, seated nude, somehow conveying thousands of years of her people’s heritage as hunters in that portrait. She grins. _Only slightly flushes_. Her people, especially those raised in the clansteads, kinfasts, and huntfasts of the wilderness, are not especially modest—something she had not necessarily relayed to Sabine at the time.

The grin freezes on her lips as her eyes fall on the other, slightly larger handprint, opposite the child-Sabine’s. A handprint in orange, with a slight black border around it, colors from his culture and the owner of the handprint. Representations of a lust for life and justice sought. 

She wipes tears away—tears for a woman she had never met, at least not knowingly. A Mandalorian warrior; an artist like her niece, but an artist with _beskar_. The durable armor, resistant all but the most powerful energy weapons, that was the symbol of Covenant’s mother’s people. 

J’ohlana Wren had reforged the armor; a gift on their wedding day. A wedding day made possible, at least indirectly, by the example of Padawan Ahsoka Tano on a snowy world known as Carlacc. Where the example of Ahsoka’s defense of innocents had yanked the young woman from her path as a member of the Nite Owls and Death Watch. 

Ahsoka looks at the tears on her fingertips. An example that could be said to have led to her death, and that of her unborn child, at the hands of Imperial commandos. Commandos who had served with her husband and the father of that child as Republic commandos in the previous war. 

Actions that had forced him to kill the Imperials—his brothers of the past. Probably one of two times in his life that he had come close to touching the Dark Side

Ahsoka shakes her head. She focuses on the holopic, her grief replaced by something else. She smiles at the unique shade of green of the armor—a green so dark as to be black. A color known on his father’s world as Blackthorn green—one of the colors of the Elder Family he belongs to. The symbol of faith on his father’s world; of duty on his mother’s. _The same thing, really,_ she thinks.

Her eyes track to a narrow strip of purple silk tied around his abdomen. An honorific of Clan Skirata on Mandalore, a member of who had been a mentor to him in those lost times. A color also with two different meanings for his culture. Justice for Corellia; luck for Mandalore.

The final color, the gold trim along the tops of the armor and the helmet under his arm, represented power—power in different forms. For the Blackthorns, the power to ensure the justice of the purple and orange, a power backed up by his faith in the light, as well as the belief in luck that his father and mother’s people put such belief in.

A belief that his beloved master, Shaak Ti, had never once tried to discourage him, even though more orthodox Jedi would have.

Ahsoka focuses on the helmet under his arm. She smiles at memories of her own. Instead of a Mandalorian bucket, the helmet is that of a Republic commando officer, one that brings back the memories of her own brothers of the 501st. The smile doesn’t fade with pain, but of the good times on any number of hellholes. The laughter and light—the hope in them, even with so little to call their own. She refuses to rise to anger any more at what had happened at the end of the war. She concentrates on the survivors, at least three of which had found their way; had survived the fall of the Empire and the Republic—two entities that had, at the end of the day, cared nothing for them.

The man in the holo had been one who had cared, fighting for their survival in the war, and after. Along with a few of the Jedi generals who struggled with the concept of an army of slaves. 

Ahsoka realizes that she is being watched. Sabine is smiling, her hair sleep tousled. She throws the blanket off and swings her legs from the bed. She rises, then walks over to Ahsoka’s bunk and sits next to her. She leans her head against Ahsoka’s shoulder and gazes silently at her uncle’s face.

“He was so young,” Sabine whispers. Ahsoka smiles.

“Not so young, ‘bine,” she says. “He was a few years older than you are now, not quite thirty.”

“I remembered the gray hair, even as a kid. Never thought it made him look old,” Sabine says. “Lassa told me that it turned gray after the Jedi died.”

Ahsoka looks away. “It turned after he watched his master die on Kamino. He’d shaven his head for a disguise. He was in a coma for six months, afterwards. It grew back gray.”

She sees Sabine reach out, touch the gunbelt, with its teeth on the front. She reaches up, her eyes asking permission, touching the headdress that Ahsoka had donned; a different one from when she had fought with the Ghosts. A headdress with many of the teeth, rather than one.

Ahsoka smiles as Sabine’s fingers trace downward over her forehead markings. As it falls away, she touches the large Corellian blaster in its holster in the holo. A blaster given to the young Jedi that both have begun their search for in unknown space. She sees Sabine’s face darken. _Given after Ahsoka had not returned from Malachor._

“I think he gave it to Ezra, after he realized that he couldn’t blame him for your disappearance. Especially after he had made contact with you through the Force.”

Ahsoka smiles. “It’s good he didn’t injure him. Seeing how Ezra was the means to actually saving me.”

Sabine reaches over and hugs her tightly to her. She takes a deep breath, glances at the holo again over Sabine’s bare shoulder. She allows her chin to rest as she gazes at the green-bladed lightsaber held loosely in a reverse grip. She laughs at the memory of her master’s disdain for the reverse grip taught to her by her youngling clan-master, a Padawan named Taliesin Croft. 

She manages not to feel the twinge of pain at the thought of Anakin. He was at peace now, or at least she hopes so. 

Ahsoka locks her eyes on the the blade, to push her other memories away. A lightsaber with a wooden handle; the carefully crafted blade of a beloved student. A student whose fate is unknown, when Croft, unable to touch the Force at the time, unable in his mind to protect him, had taken the lightsaber, given him money, and told him to run. Had told him to hide—to never touch the Force again.

She can only imagine Gungi’s anger at his master. A young Wookiee, so proud when he had crafted this same lightsaber, under her own watchful eyes. 

Ahsoka knows that this was one of two lightsabers that he carried in a concealing case on the back of his belt, neither of them his own. His own had been lost on Kashyykk, in the final hours of the Jedi and the Republic, on a mission given him by Yoda. A mission to unravel the conspiracy of the clones and their ultimate purpose. 

The other lightsaber is a symbol of his failure. The same lightsaber that had given him the three-armed, vaguely star-shaped scar on his forehead, wielded by a terrified clone cadet, just seconds after he had plunged it into the back and chest of the blade’s owner.

Croft’s beloved master and Hunt-mother, Shaak Ti.

She feels Sabine shift under her, bringing her out of the darkness.

“Hey. You need some sleep. Let me go pee, then I’ll take over the watch.”

Sabine stands, her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes narrowed at Ahsoka’s own thunder. After a moment, Ahsoka nods. 

Later, as she lays in the bunk, she deepens her connection to the Force. After a moment, the three colors of the armor flashes in her head. She hears the drawl in her head. She smiles, knowing that a blue, orange, and white light shines in his Force-sense; a connection that seems to be strengthening.

 _Hey, Runt_ , the light says. 

She braces for the expected smartassed response to her gaze.

He surprises her, but only a little. 

_We’re alive, Ahsoka. We’ve lost a lot, but we’ve gained more. The Chain is unbroken, as well._

His words immediately set her mind on another holo, just after the one she had been looking at.

A holo taken by him, of the Links of that aforementioned Chain. The Covenant Chain of his birthworld.

The Protectors.

As her mind calms, she is conscious of Sabine taking the comm from her fingers after she had picked it up.

 _Miss, you, Bait_ , her fading mind says. _Can’t wait to see you when this is over._

_I know, Runt. I’ll be waiting. You do what you have to do. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t._

Both of their minds speak the three words in harmony, that they had rarely spoken; that they had rarely needed to.


End file.
